Pages

Thursday, January 26, 2012

My Dinosaur Art Heroine!

Most small time rpg publishers like myself understand the importance of public domain art. Don't get me wrong - I love commissioning artists. Most of the money I've made on NOD and my other products has gone to commissioning art, and if I made ten times as much money, I'd commission ten times as much art. But when your margins are especially tight, you can't afford not to use the free stuff, especially when so much of the fantasy art produced pre-1923 is so dang good! Of course, your choices can be a bit limited, which is why the mother lode I recently found must be shared with the world!

Mariana Ruiz - who goes by the handle lady_of_hats on Wikimedia Commons has drawn quite a few groovy dinosaurs and released them into the public domain. God bless her! Check these beasties out ...

Pretty groovy. If you want more, just go to Wikimedia Commons and do a search by her name. There are lots of other science illustrations (mostly technical) mixed in, as well as this kick ass image of a three-headed knight (I call dibs!)

And just for shits and giggles, a size chart (hey, got me lots of page views last time!) I threw in the three-headed knight for comparison purposes, assuming he's the same size as a human being.

The size range in dinosaurs always astounds me.

On a side note - I finished writing Space Princess over the weekend ... well, mostly. There are a few sci-fi monsters I want to add, but for all intents and purposes it is now in the editing stage. I added some vehicles for the game (hover cars, battle tanks, war walkers) and an additional class - the Space Ranger (maybe I'll change it to Astro-Ranger or Cosmic Ranger to avoid any clashes with a certain space ranger that works for that very litigious mouse who resides in Anaheim).

When I publish Space Princess, I'm going to launch a new blog devoted to a community effort (well, assuming the community wants to do it) at populating a pulp sci-fi planet - Kepler-22B.

Details to come, but I'm hoping it will turn into a fun project and provide sci-fi buffs with a place to run adventures. Naturally, my first contribution will be a jungle sector teeming with dinosaurs and ruined Preserver Domes (whatever those are). Stay tuned!